At the altitude of England you need about 40 m^2 of solarpanels to run a normal house, if you are not using electricity for heating.The picture shows a 1.5 m¨2 panel, so the amount of electricity collected is probably not enough to pay for the infrastructure.

Building energy efficient houses is a good idea, but you have to do it properly and teach people how not to waste energy by running aircondition at same time as the heater and stuff like that.

What happens when people move into these "efficient" houses is they leave shiat on, use more power, etc. The problem is the houses are VERY efficient at not letting that heat out, so they then have to run the air conditioning in the winter. They're so sealed that the houses MUST have forced circulation in order for the residents to breathe, etc.

The US experimented with "high efficiency housing" for a while in the mid to late 80's and we discovered it was bullshiat then. You end up with mold filled death traps that smell worse than a box of dead squirrels.

Efficiency isn't healthy. The correct design is "low expense housing" where you make it possible to have 90% of the windows actual area open, you put large vents in the roof to get rid of heat, you install a two layer roof so most the heat never gets into the attic and you place ventilation systems in every room so people can dump the hot air from their computers, televisions and general kitchen use.

DownDaRiver:miss diminutive: New development: Solar Panels can be seen on the roofs of the houses in the complex which was only completed in July 2011 at a cost of £5.6million

Solar panels? In the UK?

Yeah, I think I found your problem.

That^^And I know solar tech has gotten more efficient. But what are they trying to power with one window size panel?

That is a hot water pre-heat panel. Seems a bit small but some of the vapor phase ones work very well. That doesn't look like the good ones so I'm guessing it makes the water cooler for something like 20 hours of a day in the summer and worse the rest of the time.

UK water heaters are typically an electric kettle like devices in the shower. Having electricity in the shower was apparently safer than the pressure tank systems that are so common in the US. Some places have a water tank that is open at the top with a float valve like a toilet tank and an emersion heater that may or may not be on timer or thermostat.